No one I know enjoys making mistakes. On the bright side, a mistake is the easiest way to learn. These marketing mistakes have the potential to sabotage your effort. Fortunately, awareness and then correction is the best remedy.
1. Pay lip service to your brand
This signifies you talk about your brand more than you live the brand. Remember, actions speak louder than words.
Once your brand strategy is decided, your brand identity in place, and your style guidelines sorted, it’s time to live the brand. The nitty-gritty of brand management then has to swing into action across your business and across all corners of the customer experience. In your business everyone is a custodian of your brand and has responsibility for making the brand felt.
Irrespective of the department your customers deal with, they expect brand consistency in every interaction, from the back end to the front end. To know if you’re being consistent, test your brand performance yearly. Make it a habit to audit your business and report back on current performance. Make corrections as needed. Dynamic businesses are always open to improvement and continually strive to make the most of their brand.
2. No meaningful point of difference
Differentiation is easy to say, harder to do. You might think you’ve differentiated your business although your customers might think otherwise. A Harvard Business Review article referenced a survey which revealed 80% of managers said they believed their company was strongly differentiated, but fewer than 10% of their customers agreed. The only ‘difference’ was found to be the space between perception and reality.
To find your point of difference, identify a quality that only you own and that no other company can claim. ‘Owning it’ means expressing it through your brand and everything your business does, all the time.
The stronger your claim, the further your business will sit in the mind of your customer versus your competitors.
3. Fail to plan your communications
Every communication, whether to your colleagues or customers, requires an understanding of your audience, the key objective, your main message, and how, and how often, you intend to deliver that message. Whether you’re speaking with your internal or external audience, having a structured plan tests your thinking, supports your initiatives and their execution.
Create a plan before you take action. Use it to support a change in business strategy, a deal pitch, a content management strategy, a new website launch, a recruitment drive, and the list goes on. The complexity of the initiative and what’s at stake will dictate the complexity of the planning process. If the project is small, don’t overcomplicate the plan. Keep to a communications planning structure that you’re likely to follow rather than a complex one you won’t use.
The best communications plans ask and answer the right questions.
4. Forget to focus on the customer
The deadliest mistake is to fail to make your customer the priority or fail to understand your customer’s needs. To determine whether or not your focus is out of place, check to see how easy it is for customers to do business with you at all stages of the relationship. If the experience is painless, you’ll invite more business.
A solid customer focus creates clarity in all areas of your business and strengthens your business purpose. Everyone in the business works with the same goal and more time is spent on the customer than on internal competition. Test whether the actions of your business are customer-oriented or company-centric, and be prepared to change if the focus isn't right.
5. Place tactics ahead of strategy
With the explosion of marketing mediums and increased technology tools available to marketers today there are opportunities to save time as well as waste time.
With so much choice, the smart way forward is make sure your strategy is set before you end up in a tactical whirlpool. Don’t confuse a strategic decision with a tactical one. If you focus on changing an aspect of your tactical marketing mix without evaluating whether a change is needed to your strategy, you’ll concentrate your valuable time and resources in the wrong area.
All tactical activities need to align to a strategy - that's how you test their relevance. Lead with the strategy then find the appropriate tactic to execute. This is important to make sense of the countless shiny tactical choices.
6. View outsourcing as an overhead
When it’s important to get the right work done, re-evaluate what you’re currently effort, or access skills you don’t have, then outsourcing provides that solution to boost your business. Outsourcing, in whatever form you need it, delivers you the most benefit when used as a partnership. Successful entrepreneurs know they can’t do it alone, so they develop solid partnerships to strengthen or complement their efforts. They free themselves to accomplish more in other areas where their time is better spent. Just like the African proverb ‘It takes a village to raise a child’, outsourcing provides your team support, learning opportunities, offers flexibility and provides an ability to maintain momentum greater than you could achieve alone.
Use outsourcing to not only stay afloat but benefit from another perspective if you’re too close to the issues. To get the most out of an outsourcing partnership: be clear about what you think you need; be open to questions you hadn't asked before; and be ready for suggestions that can improve your business practices.
7. Fall victim to the silos mentality
Wherever your brand is present, marketing needs to be active in the business. And because your business and brand are one, marketing can't only happen in the marketing department.
Every area of the company has a part to play, otherwise it wouldn't exist. Working across departments that don’t want to collaborate isn't always smooth but it’s worth understanding where the obstacles are and what can you learn from them. Creative challenges within partnerships can produce wonderful results; just think of partnerships like Lennon and McCartney, Jagger and Richards, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. Ultimately all departments should align to the business plan and brand.
Good ideas are shared ideas. Don’t worry where the idea came from, be the one who can execute it. For example, content doesn’t have to come from marketing, it's better sourced from the collective knowledge in the business. Take ideas from the bottom, top, and across your business.
8. Measure activities in the wrong way
How can you determine your success if you measure your initiatives with the wrong metrics? The only activities that matter are the ones that link to the bottom line. Regardless of whether or not you’re part of the C-Suite, it doesn't hurt to behave like you are. Act commercially and be aware of how your business measures results.
To gain the support of your leadership team, report on metrics that have business value and use them to show how marketing expenditure is an investment in the business.
